Oracle Blog

a weblog by Tony Beckham

Dual Boot Soalris and Ubuntu

After much agony I have managed to set up my Ultra20 to be a dual boot of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and Solaris Developer Express. The issue is that the Ubuntu GRUB doesn't play nice with the Solaris file system, and if you use the Solaris GRUB you have another problem: Ubuntu Feisty Fawn uses another form of identifying its partitions not the usual (hd0,0) or something like that. instead you have this long uid or something that the Solaris GRUB doesn't handle. Enough of the problems as there are many more, on with the fix.

Here are the steps:
\*I used an 80Gb HD and just split it down the middle, 40 for Solarais, 40 for Ubuntu.

1. Install Solaris to one partition, You will have to additionally add a root partition, swap space and /export/home partitions in this partition.

2. Boot and make sure Solaris is fine.

3. Insert Ubuntu CD and restart

4. Install Ubuntu to the unused partition, taking care not to overlap or delete any of your Solaris partitions.

5. Now boot again. Hopefully this time the Ubuntu GRUB boots. (Don't worry, we will add Solaris to the menu in a second)

6. Open /boot/grub and make a back up of menu.lst

7. Edit menu.lst and add the following to the boot options:

title Solaris-DevEx
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

\*note: your Solaris partition may not be (hd0,1) it may be (hd0,0) or something else

8. Save the new grub configuration and reboot.

9. Enter the GRUB list by hitting "esc" when prompted. You should now have an option for Sol Dev-Ex, select this.

10. Now the Solaris GRUB kicks in and you can start Solaris.

You can now enjoy Ubuntu and Solaris on the same machine. Hopes this helps, it took me some time, many many reboots and reinstalls, and a lot of coffee to get this right.